Thank you very much to “Pedroguy”, “JohnWill” , & “Mojo1121” for educating me with the threads on this subject with the Realtek RTL8101 Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC NDIS 6.0 driver. Had these three not gone from the Valley to the Mountain with various solutions to help find an answer for the lady trying to get her computer to work, I would have been lost of just what to do with this new computer “that should not have had a problem”. They’re advice didn’t help me fix the problem, but what it did was give me guidance to follow solutionary steps to diagnose the internet problem and save time by reading what did and did not work.

Here is what happened to me…..I purchased a Toshiba Satellite L355 Celeron CPU 2.20GHz laptop with Vista Home Basic 6.0 version from Wal-Mart in late August for $300 on sale. My Norton 360 virus protection lasted 3mos ending a few days before Thksgvg. The wireless connection started to falter on Black Friday while we were looking at circulars. How ironic was it that we were going to buy another Toshiba for my college niece. We had 5 laptops in the room working perfectly except the Toshiba. The wireless router was connected but the internet explorer on the LAN would not. An error message on desktop said that the LAN network cable was unplugged. After spending 2 full days trouble shooting with Cox High Speed Cable in Tulsa, and Belkin Wireless Routers in Ft. Worth , both entities separately determined that the Realtek RTL8101 Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC NDIS 6.0 driver no longer worked after walking me through DOS applications to check software and drivers.

I reset and restored files on the last day that the laptop worked perfectly, which was on Thksgvg Day. That did not work. That Realtek driver still would not work. NOTHING WORKED FROM YOUR THREADS, FROM THE TECKY SUPPORT GUYS FROM BELKIN, OR TROUBL SHOOTING FOR 6 HOURS FROM TOSHIBA EXCEPT THING....A TWO HOUR RECOVERY FROM THE HARD DISK TO THE ORIGINAL MOMENT THE LAPTOP WAS TURNED ON FROM THE BOX.

Here is what Toshiba technical support implied after 6 hours of wasting my time going thru unnecessary step: When the trial version of Norton 360 expires, it is a common problem that the browser stops working. There is a glitch with the expiration of the anti-virus software that stops the Realtek RTL8101 Family PCI-E Fast Ethernet NIC NDIS 6.0 driver from making a connection using your browser to the internet.

Preventative Solution: Purchasing a full version of Norton 360 or a anti-virus software/firewall will prevent this experience, but you must have Toshiba technical support to remove the trial version from the laptop. How interesting. I bet Norton has sold a lot of subscrips with this ploy with Toshiba which is disappointing, but business clever. I personally don’t have tons of discretionary time to waste, so I hope this helps another person as you have helped me.

Final note: The desktop appearance and software features were oddly very different than the original set up.

THIS THREAD HAS EXPIRED.
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